Conan the Barbarian: Thirst for Blood Trailer

On the Conan Film website they have posted a new trailer entitled, “Thirst for Blood”. It is unclear if it is a teaser or a trailer (a teaser being a trailer that shows footage not actually in the film). In my humble opinion, this does not bode well for the film. It shows Conan as a ruthless, psychopathic 7-year-old killing machine.

My gripe with this scene is that the tragedy of the first film was that Conan was a peaceful, doe-eyed child that was taken away and forged into a killer.

They are going for the easy win. “Oh, he’s Conan, he kills stuff.” Conan himself reflects in the first film that he wasted his entire life in the pursuit of vengeance and death.

Robert E. Howard’s Conan was already an adept warrior from an early age, because he lived in a harsh, savage environment where one needed to be able to defend oneself to survive. This is one of the few things the new film acknowledged (though completely botched it by making him look like a Hyborian Age Michael Myers rather than someone who killed because he had to to survive).

The tragedy of the doe-eyed, peaceful little boy being forged into a warrior is a potent bildungsroman, but it’s a character arc utterly alien from Howard’s Conan. As such, you’ll not be seeing Conan training as a gladiator or sword masters in the upcoming film. One could argue that the idea of Conan always having to fight even as a child is a more subtle form of tragedy, that due to his tribe constantly fighting with Picts, Vanir and enemy Cimmerians, he never knew innocence. Unfortunately it’s something the film doesn’t bother with in favour of mindless violence.